Monday, July 8, 2013

U.S. Hands Off Syria!

In early
June, the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) initiated discussions among
all major U.S. antiwar coalitions regarding the
critical need for united local and regional antiwar protests to counter the
escalating U.S. and U.S.-backed attacks on Syria. The result was an agreement with
UNAC, ANSWER, United for Peace and Justice, the InternationalActionCenter, Veterans for Peace, World Can’t
Wait, and now hundreds of other groups for June 28-July 17,
2013
actions in cites across the country.

The central
demands of the protest are:

• Stop the
U.S./NATO/Israeli war and all forms of intervention against Syria!

•
Self-determination free from outside intervention for the Syrian people!

The joint
statement (see text below) recognized that there has been a “conflict that has
been raging [in Syria] for more than two years.” Indeed,
the signers have evidenced a variety of often counterposed positions on the
Syrian civil war, with some forces, including Socialist Action, seeing its
origins in the fully justified massive uprising of the Syrian people against
the repressive and reactionary Assad dictatorship.

Others
partaking in this worthy united effort to stop U.S. intervention in all of its forms
and support the right of the Syrian people to self-determination, have declined
to take any position on the matter. This includes UNAC, which aspires to unite
all activists against the policies of U.S. imperialism. And finally, there are
those in the movement who support the Assad regime in one form or another.

All of the
endorsers agree, however, that the steady and now rapidly increasing U.S.—as
well as Israeli—political, economic, and military intervention has no objective
other than “regime change,” that is, the replacement of the Assad regime with
one more amenable to advancing the interests of U.S. imperialism to dominate
the region and its people and resources in neo-colonial fashion. None of the
signers harbor any illusions that the U.S. aim is to provide “humanitarian” aid
to the oppressed Syrian people or to help establish any form of democracy in
Syria or anywhere else in the Middle East; hence the unity statement includes
the demand, “U.S. Out of the Middle East!”

The
essential facts of the varying forms of U.S. intervention in Syria have been known from the beginning.
Today, fewer people than ever believe that the military support from Qatar,
Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Libya to the Islamic fundamentalist components of the
opposition, often allied with al-Qaida, represented the independent decisions
of these repressive and reactionary governments.

These facts
were dramatically shown by The New York Times in late June with
a detailed account of Libyan military forces of the fundamentalist variety
regularly sending massive quantities of heavy weapons from the former Gadhafi
army to its Islamic co-thinkers in Syria. This alone demonstrated in bold
relief that the U.S. has been willing to allow aid to go
even to its professed radical Islamist enemies, provided only that they
momentarily advanced U.S. political and economic interests in
the Middle
East.

These
interests also dictated a two-year diplomatic and military effort to patch
together a new regime in Syria that would maintain that nation’s
essential military, political, and economic structures—and preferably without
having to include Assad. To date every U.S. effort to achieve this goal, from
the international conferences overseen by U.S. Secretaries of State Hillary
Clinton and John Kerry to the more recent shift to some form of Geneva conference, have come to naught.

The massive
U.S. diplomatic and military pressures on the broad array
of opposition forces have proven incapable of uniting them in a common effort
to replace Assad with a credible alternative acceptable to imperialism.

Until
recently, a major obstacle to this U.S. effort was the undeniable fact that
most of the popular Syrian fighting forces had rejected an imperialist-imposed
solution. This component of the opposition was based on disparate units of the
former Assad army that had refused his orders to slaughter the opposition’s
initial mass protests, and the numerous and still present Local Coordinating
Committees, which aim to organize community defense organizations and provide vital
social services to the country’s massively destroyed infrastructure.

However,
recent gains by Assad’s army, bolstered by Hezbollah fighting units from Lebanon, have strengthened the impulse
among some desperate rebel sectors to call on the Obama administration to
provide them with a massive amount of arms to defeat Assad’s tyranny. This is a
mistaken tactic on their part. History has repeatedly demonstrated that
imperialist arms never come without fatal strings attached. The
Iraqi, Afghani, and Libyan people have learned this lesson all too well.
Imperialist intervention produced nothing less than compliant U.S. puppet regimes, exploited to the
hilt by their new masters.

In the
meantime, the ideological character of the armed struggle has significantly changed
due to the strengthened role within it of Islamist fundamentalist groups, many
of whom have the vision of imposing a reactionary clerical regime on Syria and isolating the country’s
non-Sunni population. Concerns have mounted in Washington regarding the fact that the
shipments of arms that its Persian Gulf allies are making to the rebels—which have recently
included anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons—mainly favor Islamist-oriented
units. The disruptive dangers of a heightened radical Sunni-Hezbollah conflict
on its border, including possible intervention by Iranian troops, are of
particular concern to Israel.

The
Islamist presence, along with the gains by the Assad-Hezbollah military
alliance, are major factors that have contributed to the recent declaration by
the Obama administration that it would more openly and directly supply arms to
sectors of the Syrian opposition. Obama announced the shift in tactics on the
eve of his departure for the G-8 conference in Northern Ireland, at which the major imperialist
countries were planning to discuss the Syrian issue.

For public
consumption, President Obama justified the increased U.S. intervention with the claim that
the White House now had “high confidence” that the Assad regime had employed
the chemical poison sarin on two occasions during combat in Aleppo. (To date, however, no reliable
evidence of the use of sarin has been released.)

In
preparing its deeper involvement in the Syrian conflict, the White House also
evidently sensed that the time was right to leak to the press some information
concerning its earlier covert military aid to the anti-Assad opposition. This
echoed reports from sources in the Jordanian government and elsewhere. Thus,
the Chicago Tribune and other media outlets reported in late June
that since late 2012, if not earlier, CIA and U.S. special operations troops have
trained several hundred Free Syrian Army troops with materiel including
anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons.

The
training has been conducted both in northern Jordan—using the ruse of U.S. “war games” with the Jordanian
army—and in southern Turkey. But according the British Guardian (March
8, 2013), Jordan now seems to be the preferred scene for U.S. training efforts,
since Turkey has allowed radical groups like the al-Nusra Front to become
dominant on the northern front, while focusing its own efforts on combating the
national struggle of the Kurds.

Socialist
Action fully supports the June/July actions jointly called for by the major
portion of the U.S. antiwar movement and its allies
among oppressed people. These protests express our common opposition to all
imperialist interventions and afford the peoples of these nations the best
opportunity for determining their own futures. Were it not for imperialist
intervention over the past century and more, the world would indeed be a
qualitatively different place.

While it is
undeniable that the very forces that initiated the just struggle against the
Assad dictatorship have been seriously weakened, if not marginalized, their
ongoing efforts to coalesce the broadest forces possible, today and in the
future, regardless of the outcome of the present civil war, will prove
decisive.

The fight
for freedom and democracy in Syria is in our view inseparable from the
fight for socialism—that is, a society where the vast majority organize society
in their own interest free from capitalist and imperialist exploitation in its
myriad forms. The construction of a deeply rooted revolutionary socialist party
in Syria is a prerequisite to the
achievement of this objective.

All out
against the U.S.-orchestrated wars in Syria and the Middle East! Self-determination for Syria! U.S. out now!

******

United
Statement and Call for Action to Oppose U.S./NATO and Israeli War on Syria

No more
wars! U.S. out of the Middle East!

National
Days of Action:

June
28-July 17

The White
House’s June 13th announcement that it would begin directly supplying arms to
the opposition in Syria is a dramatic escalation of the
U.S./NATO war against that country.

Thousands
of U.S. troops and intelligence personnel
are training opposition forces and coordinating operations in Turkey and Jordan.

Israel, the recipient of more than $3
billion annually in U.S. military aid has carried out heavy
bombing raids against Syria. The Pentagon has developed plans
for a “no-fly” zone over Syria, threatening a new U.S. air war.

The pretext
for this escalation is the assertion, presented without any actual evidence,
that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons in the conflict that has
been raging for more than two years.

Like their
predecessors, President Obama and other top U.S. officials pretend to be
concerned about “democracy” and “human rights” in Syria, but their closest
allies in the campaign against Syria are police-state, absolute monarchies like
Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Once again the so-called “Responsibility to protect,”
R2P, is used as a pretext for NATO to dominate this region.

Just as the
false claim of “weapons of mass destruction” was used as justification for the
invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, the allegations that
chemical weapons were used by the Syrian military is meant to mask the real
motives of Washington and its allies. Their aim is to carry out “regime
change,” as part of the drive to create a “new Middle East.”

The
invasion of Iraq in 2003, the U.S.-backed Israeli
war in Lebanon in 2006, the 2011 NATO bombing of Libya, the now-escalating war in Syria and the growing threats against Iran are part of a coordinated regional
effort by the United States, Britain and France to dominate this oil-rich and
strategic region.

The U.S.
government cuts basic services and has eliminated hundreds of thousands of
public sector workers jobs in the last three years in the name of a
discredited austerity which has destroyed the economy, but has unlimited
billions available for wars of aggression and NSA surveillance of almost every
American.

We join
together to call for National Days of Action, June 28- July
15, 2013,
to demand:

• Stop the
U.S./NATO/Israeli war and all forms of intervention against Syria!

•
Self-determination free from outside intervention for the Syrian people!